And the number of full-time workers who said bad weather prevented them from getting to their jobs was well below the norm in January. Some 262,000 workers could not make it to work because of the weather, down 21% from the historical average in the month.

What to make of it all? Hard to say. Economists believe it will take another month or two to sort things out, though they don’t pin as much blame on Mother Nature for the soft January jobs report as they did for the puny 75,000 increase in December. Read about 113,000 gain in employment in January.

A big reason it’s hard to figure out the effects of weather is the peculiar nature of how the government calculates job growth.

The Labor Department sends out questionnaires to work places and households to ask them about their employment status during the week that includes the 12th day of the month. If the weather is terrible that week, there’s a good chance the employment report will be weaker than usual.

If the weather is fine, well, no one’s going to talk about the weather.

In December, the worst bout of weather took place during the survey week. The best week of weather in January, by contrast, occurred in the week that included Jan. 12.

“This January’s weather was mostly terrible, but the employment report survey week was actually unusually warm,” economist Ted Wieseman of Morgan Stanley wrote in a report.

The difference might account for the sharp swing in employment over the past two months in construction and manufacturing, industries that are often suffer winter disruptions. Construction companies cut 22,000 jobs in December, for example, and then added 48,000 positions in January, according to the government’s seasonally adjusted estimate.

That’s the biggest two-month swing in three years and the sort of thing that mainly occurs during the winter.

Yet the relatively decent weather during the January survey week also strongly suggests there’s more at work in the slowdown in hiring than just icy temperatures and mounds of snow. Read: Reaction to jobs report.